LinkedIn has been beefing up their advertising platform to bring it more in line with Facebook recently and today on the LinkedIn Blog, they announced that their DirectAds advertising platform has been updated to include CPC (cost per click) ads. Previously, they were just offering impression based ad packages which isn’t ideal to small businesses with smaller marketing budgets.  Now that CPC ads are an option, why not try LinkedIn advertising. Many of you have tried Google Ads by now and some even Facebook ads. While LinkedIn doesn’t have the same user base and web traffic as either of those two sites (only about 37 million members), many will fall into the typical age range of engaged couples.  As the internet space becomes more crowded, branching out and trying different marketing avenues is a must.

When will Twitter release a CPC ad platform?

How do you generate new business? This is very good question to ask yourself.  Through surveys and discussions, we have found that a significant amount of vendors in the industry rely on referrals from their happy customers (”word of mouth”) and networking groups for business growth.  Relying solely on these two ways of generating new business can make it very challenging for vendors to sometimes predict and control business growth.  This is where the internet can play in.

I found a good post that highlights some key things to consider when looking to use the internet to get more referrals.  Here is a quick summary:

• Great product and service = happy customer. Word spreads fast online so having happy and satisfied customers will help your business (subscribing to your blog, connecting with you on LinkedIn, following you on Twitter, etc.). On the other hand, unhappy customers can easily cause harm to your online reputation. So make sure to maintain a high level of your product and service!

• Be committed! Your clients have to be willing to refer you, so you have to be committed to making sure they see success and are please with your product and service. To do this, you have to know your client and develop a level of understanding and trust. Look for ways to always maintain and improve this relationship to make sure expectations are being met.

• Give good reason. Find ways to connect with your clients online by engaging in inbound marketing – create good, educational content on your website (that is easy to understand), blog about yourself and your business, engage in social interaction with your clients (via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.). All of these ways will help you connect with your clients and in return give them a good reason to refer you.

So I turn the question over to you, how do you generate more business?  Share in the comments section!

If you’re like me, you want your blog posts to reach as many people as possible. Feeds and social networks have made it easier, but this morning Chris Brogan highlighted a few easy ways to promote blog posts that reaffirmed most of what I do after each post I write. So I wanted to share to see what you’re doing to get word out that you’ve got a great post to read.

1. Bookmark your best posts on Delicious
2. Use StumbleUpon to bookmark posts as well
3. Use the status message on LinkedIN to link to your blog post
4. An interesting idea is when leaving a comment on an industry related blog, put the blog post link in the URL field instead of your normal blog URL.  However, by no means mention your post.  Simply leave an insightful comment adding to the discussion
5. Share your post on Facebook using BlogCast (could the status message here as well)
6. Make sure your posts get shared FriendFeed automatically
7. Let Zemanta insert related article links at the bottom of your story.  You can get the plug-in for Wordpress, Movable Type, Firefox and others here.
8. Tweet about your post on Twitter.

So what ideas work for you?  Or better yet, didn’t work for you?  I’d love to hear.